These days, Marla Maples finds herself increasingly preoccupied with the topic of chemtrails. Once known primarily as the former mistress and later the second wife of Donald Trump, Maples has now emerged as an unexpected figure in the “Make America Healthy Again” movement. Her role gained prominence after she facilitated a connection between her ex-husband and her long-time friend, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who serves as the Health and Human Services Secretary.

At a recent gathering in the Hamptons aimed at promoting her expanding wellness initiative, the Global Wellness Forum, Maples shared her long-standing efforts to forge an alliance between Trump and Kennedy. “I’ve known Bobby for many years,” she remarked, exuding an ethereal presence with her feathered hair, a striking gold maxi-dress, and platform espadrilles. “I introduced him to Donald Trump back in 2016, hoping they would collaborate.”

However, as Maples recounted, numerous factors thwarted her efforts at the time. “There were a lot of forces at work that kind of prevented that from happening,” she explained, as captured in a video shared with the Daily Mail.

Despite her involvement in these high-profile connections, Maples chose not to provide an interview for the Daily Mail regarding this story.

‘But there were a lot of forces at work that kind of prevented that from happening,’ she added, according to a video of her remarks obtained by the Daily Mail. 

Maples declined to be interviewed by the Daily Mail for this story. 

After her ex-husband was nearly killed by an assassin’s bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania Maples recalled in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the second person she heard from was Kennedy, then an independent candidate for the White House.

Kennedy was trying to get in touch with Trump, the Republican nominee.

‘He reached out and he says, ‘I need to get a message to the president,’ and he says, ‘can you do that?’ I said, ‘of course I can,’ Maples said. ‘I think that moment was probably a good trigger. Yeah, he was on a plane the next day.’ 

Kennedy flew to Milwaukee where the Republican National Convention was taking place and began discussions with Trump about an endorsement, doing so in August, a day after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago wrapped up.

Trump’s Make America Great Again coalition got larger by adding Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again followers – a group that includes shades of environmentalism, vaccine skepticism and conspiratorial thinking.

Maples originally met RFK Jr. through an environmental group and during the COVID-19 pandemic, shared one of Kennedy’s posts that featured Bill Gates and pushed a conspiracy theory that humans could be implanted with chips and if they refused to receive a vaccine 

That led the actress, singer and model to launch the Global Wellness Forum, alongside vaccine skeptics Sayer Ji and Dr. Edward Group in June of this year.

‘I grew up in a small town in Georgia, where we would wade through the rivers and the creeks and we climbed the trees and we never thought twice about seeing a sky that was filled with huge chemical trails across it, right?’ she asked the crowd. 

Maples articulated her concerns about ‘what’s coming down from the clouds, from cloud seeding’ and ‘how it’s affecting our bodies, how it’s affecting our blood.’ 

The conspiracy theory that condensation coming off of airplanes contains dangerous chemicals has been around for a long time, but with MAHA members – and Kennedy – repeating it, it’s now fueling action in state legislatures. 

Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill in May to ban geo-engineering and weather modification, which prohibits the release of substances into the atmosphere. 

Maples, who moved to Florida in 2021, cheered the passage of that MAHA-friendly bill there and said there was more work to do. 

‘So far we’ve helped move to end geo-engineering in the state of Florida and we have about 35 other states that we are following now,’ Maples updated the Hamptons crowd. ‘So we’re getting close, we’re taking this model and moving it to other states.’ 

Maples also publicly supported the national version of the legislation, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Clear Skies Act. 

One MAHA observer who declined to be named told the Daily Mail that Maples is known to be ‘very big into conspiracies,’ though it’s unclear how often she speaks with RFK Jr. these days. 

‘They have told me that she’s really, really into all sorts of conspiracies,’ the source reiterated. ‘I don’t think that’s a secret.’ 

Maples first became a public figure in 1990, when she was finally outed as Trump’s mistress after a dramatic mountain-top spat with the president’s first wife, Ivana, in Aspen days before New Year’s.

Trump had the brilliant idea of having his wife, children, and mistress – with Maples getting the more expensive digs – in the same ski town around the holidays. 

‘I’m not saying if it weren’t for the showgirl, Donald and I would still be together,’ Ivana wrote in her 2017 memoir. ‘But that woman knowingly entered into a relationship with my husband, the father of three small children.’ 

Roger Gros, the managing editor of Casino Journal, recalled to Maureen Orth for a profile of Maples in Vanity Fair’s November 1990 issue: ‘Donald was not really very discreet about it.’ 

In the summer of 1989, Trump had stashed Maples at his docked Trump Princess yacht near Atlantic City, New Jersey. 

Trump would have the late architect Alan Lapidus, who designed his Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, act as ‘the beard’ and take Maples out – and then the two men would swap limousines after dinner so the real estate magnate could see his mistress, Lapidus recalled in an interview for Biography: The Trump Dynasty. 

But after the tabloids learned of the affair, Maples’ name was plastered everywhere – including an alleged quote that Trump was the ‘best sex I’ve ever had’ on the front page of the New York Post – a quip she’s denied saying.

Maples went into hiding for several months – including to a Trump associate’s Southampton beach house, which was nicknamed ‘Marla-Lago’ – before she tried to shed her ‘bimbo’ image, as Orth put it.

In the Orth profile, Maples recalled how Playboy magazine had tried to recruit her to model but found out she was just 16. 

‘The Playboy people were very depressed because I was too young,’ Maples recalled, despite the idea having her father’s blessing.

Years later, when she was married to Trump – after the birth of their daughter Tiffany – the real estate tycoon tried to get her to agree to pose nude.

‘He insisted she pose for Playboy and reportedly negotiated a million-dollar fee for her, but she refused,’ wrote author Nina Burleigh in her book, The Trump Women. 

Maples’ transition into a MAHA mom was also years in the making. 

‘Georgia Baptist Marla was raised to believe in God, for sure. But by the time she met Trump, she was open to interpretations of the Great Spirit,’ said Burleigh. 

During a 1992 tour of a new apartment with the New York Times, Maples said she based her paint choices on color vibrations, saying that she chose an aqua suede chaise lounger because she was ‘very drawn to the days of Atlantis,’ expressing a true belief in the mythological lost city.

‘She later said her years as a mistress were karmic punishment for judging adulterers as a teenaged Baptist in Georgia,’ Burleigh said.

During the birth of Tiffany, her only child with the president, she took no pain drugs while in labor, filling the private birthing suite with the sounds of New Age music and lit candles. 

Maples would release her own New Age album, The Endless, in 2013.

During her relationship with Trump, Maples also started making political donations – mostly to Democratic candidates, including to Kennedy’s brother, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, but she also donated $5,000 to the New Republican Majority Fund in 1996, according to Open Secrets data. 

Maples later donated to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential primary campaign, years before Clinton became her ex-husband’s political nemesis. 

The MAHA insider said the friendship between Maples and Kennedy dates back to when Kennedy was working with the Riverkeeper initiative to clean up New York’s waterways

‘She told me she had photos of Tiffany … strapped to her back, like cleaning up the river with him,’ the source said. ‘I think she’s one of the old school environmentalists, alternative – holistic health, all of that.’ 

MAHA mothers have credited Maples for putting issues like child food safety on the political radar. 

‘I’m so proud that Marla’s really leading the charge on a lot of the health and wellness stuff,’ Catalina Lauf, a Republican Florida congressional candidate, told the Daily Mail. 

Lauf met Maples at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump’s ex-wife remains a frequent guest, joining him and other family members of the annual New Year’s Eve celebration this year and attending the club’s other events. 

She has been impressed with how Maples has addressed toxic ingredients being in children’s food and formula in the media. 

In her interview with Australia’s ABC, Maples pushed that ‘we’re slowly been poisoning our people and we see it in the young, innocent children that are just sponges.’

As for Maples’ chemtrail concerns, Lauf, who is running to replace Republican Representative Byron Donalds, said, ‘it’s honestly something that comes up a ton,’ especially in Republican groups.

‘With the whole MAHA movement,’ Lauf said. ‘People are finally asking questions. Even with the vaccine stuff.’ 

The MAHA insider said Maples’ brand of advocacy tracks for someone standing in the center of both the MAGA and MAHA movements.

‘She kind of represents characteristics from both worlds. MAGA is – they do love conspiracy – and so does MAHA. These are people who don’t trust the government, they don’t trust the media and they don’t trust science,’ the insider said.

But the MAHA insider says that means Maples and her ilk will never truly believe anything is settled: ‘It’s an escalating point of confusion because they don’t want to trust anything that makes sense.’